Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is the one they would like to show to the world... Every so often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe...
For the surf idol Duke Kahanamoku portrait, which I created for the Surfrider Foundation, I took a photo from a book cover and abstracted the photo image into a drawing. This drawing was laminated onto a surfboard and auctioned to a buyer.
When you're trying to paint a portrait of a very specific world, you're trying to show what makes the world different. So, sometimes it means exaggerating certain kind of aspects, but I don't think it's that important or it's that much of an issue as...
Isadora: If you ever miss me, take a look at our little portrait. I say this because I fear that you'll forget me as well. I miss my father. I miss everything. Dora.
Father: What do you think? Should I, should I take Uncle Szymon's portrait? Mother: Take it, don't take it, take what you like! [sigh] Mother: Can't you see I'm worried sick?
I still find doing portraits a terrific challenge, but even though I've done hundreds of them, I've never stopped questioning the very nature of portraiture because it deals exclusively with appearances. I've never believed people are what they look ...
From inside where I live, I feel like I just perceive events in a certain rational way. I often find it sad or poignant, and it may not make me laugh a bit. But I don't mind inventing a portrait that allows others to laugh if that's what they want to...
If you want to really know something you have to observe or experience it in person; if you claim to know something on the basis of hearsay, or on happening to see it in a book, you'll be a laughingstock to those who really know.
You know how you feel somebody looking at you, and you turn, and somebody actually is? It's the same at an art gallery. You're looking at one portrait, turn around, and there is a work of art directly behind you. Because it's all energy. Every single...
The soldier in the portrait had been a respected and admired officer... The man he had become was fighting a different battle now. He had his demons, just as she had her ghosts.
To be ignorant of the future is a condition of mortal existence, with which one can make terms. To be ignorant of the present, where it concerns the life of those one loves, is an additional burden almost beyond endurance.
I have learned one lesson in all this and I will share it knowing it will do no one any good. The lesson is this: "There are none more complicit in one's undoing than one's own heart".
We demand that people should be true to the pictures we have of them, no matter how repulsive those pictures may be: we prefer the true portrait in all its homogeneity, to one with a detail added which refuses to fit in.
By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality a...
Our kids need us to be the dad, not a fun single uncle. When you can replace your 007 poster with a framed portrait of Grandma, your kids will experience an underlying sense of being at home when they are with you—whether for a weekend, a summer, o...
It's improbable for me to become lost, because I am already self-realized. A blank scene is a portrait of a glass kingdom to me. In order to become lost, one must not be able to realize their own identity, ego, and self.
'Painting like a child' isn't a negative for me... it's something only great artists can really achieve. The childlike quality of some of Picasso's drawings is precisely what makes them so masterful and extraordinary; the ability to express complete ...
Every time I want to impress someone about samples and hip-hop, I play 'Portrait of Tracy.' It's one of the greatest bass players ever doing a whole composition with only the two harmonics of electric bass; then a three-second loop in it became every...
My earliest drawing is a supposed Carracci. It wasn't very expensive, I guess, because they don't know if it's a real Carracci. But it has all these seals on it of people who've owned it, and one of the great portrait painters of England, Reynolds, h...
The gummy bears tattoo was my idea. It's my son's favorite candy. The sketch was my other son's idea. It's a self-portrait of himself. I just showed the artist his sketch and had him tattoo it on my forearm. It looks like a stick person with big hair...
'Lean on Pete' is the story of a boy and his horse, but it is never heart-warming - it ranges in tone from desperate to merely painful - and, while fascinating, it is never entertaining or redemptive. But if you want an unadorned portrait of American...
